Cloud Computing Adoption Rates: Are they as Predicted?

Cloud Computing Adoption Rates: Are they as Predicted?

Cloud computing continues to be one of the biggest buzzwords in technology. When the term first began being bandied about by an array of tech analysts a few years ago, they made a variety of predictions about the adoption rate for Cloud-based initiatives. Were these analysts sufficiently prescient? How do their predictions stand up to today’s reality?

Cloud-based Projects Continue to Grow

Considering some of the current statistics around today’s adoption rates for Cloud-based project work, some of those early predictions may have been a bit too conservative. That linked survey reveals that the analysis firm IDC forecast a cumulative average growth rate of around five percent for Cloud adoption beginning in 2009. With actual adoption rates topping those numbers, a current study from TheInfoPro quoted by Forbes in the first week of this September predicts an average growth rate of 36 percent from this year until 2016.

It’s obvious that current Cloud adoption rates are robust and are expected to continue to grow. TheInfoPro study envisions a Cloud computing market size of nearly $20 billion by 2016. Another artifact of the impact of the Cloud on the IT world is almost two-thirds of the surveyed companies no longer break out the Cloud-based portion of their IT infrastructure budgets, keeping all expenditures together in the same line item.

“As a Service” Models are Driving the Cloud Adoption Rate

The plethora of “as a Service” offerings — IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, DBaaS, NaaS, etc. — continue to drive the fast adoption rate of Cloud-based technologies. Small to medium-sized businesses normally don’t want to maintain their own internal IT staffs, so leveraging the expertise of a remote team focused on providing the software and network infrastructure to their service subscribers makes sense for these businesses.

Adoption of Cloud computing isn’t only limited to small and medium-sized organizations. The study from TheInfoPro quoted earlier ranks Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings as two of the leading Cloud-based initiatives currently underway at larger enterprises. Internal private Clouds and Cloud-provider assessments are the only Cloud-oriented project work ranking higher than IaaS and SaaS.

Looking for Cloud Adoption Predictions? Just Ask Cisco.

Considering their role as a leading manufacturer of internet trafficking equipment, Cisco obviously is an expert at predicting Cloud computing adoption rates. Their Cisco Global Index is a great source for Cloud-based forecasting and analysis. Some highlights from their study predict that the number of workloads per installed Cloud server will increase from 4.2 in 2011 to 8.5 by 2016, and most importantly by 2016, nearly two-thirds of all server workloads will be processed in the Cloud — accounting for almost two-thirds of all global data center traffic.

There remains little doubt that Cloud Computing adoption rates are growing and are forecast to continue on that upward trend. Even if Cisco is slightly optimistic in their predictions, it is reasonable to expect over half of all server activity and global data traffic will be Cloud-based within the next three years.

Recovery Zone Subscription

Related articles:

About the Recovery Zone

This online digest is dedicated to exploring BDR solutions and technology relevant to MSPs, VARs, and IT professionals.

The Recovery Zone is brought to you by StorageCraft, a company that has been producing software solutions for backup, disaster recovery, system migration, virtualization, and data protection for servers, desktops, and laptops since 2003.